Women 4 Africa partners with AMREF UK

Women4Africa is pleased to announce its partnership with well known charity AMREF UK on their ‘Stand Up For African Mothers’ campaign.

Giving birth is the most dangerous thing an African woman can do. A woman in Africa has a one in 39 chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth. For a woman in the UK, it is one in 4,600. Whilst conditions such as breech births and haemorrhaging are easily treatable in the UK, African women are likely
to die from them because so few have access to good quality health care or a trained midwife.

AMREF believes this is simply unacceptable, and what’s worse is the fact that the vast majority of these
deaths are preventable.

The ‘Stand Up for African Mothers’ campaign was launched this year to highlight this huge problem. AMREF’s objective is to train 15,000 midwives from now to 2015 to reduce 25% of maternal mortality in Africa.

“We are delighted to be working with Women4Africa and Tola to highlight this important campaign so as to ensure that all the women of Africa have the right to a safe and happy pregnancy and birth, something we all too often take for granted” Shivonne Graham, Director of Fundraising and Communications

Women4Africa is in full support of AMREF’s objectives on the ‘Stand
Up For African Mothers’ campaign. For more information on how you
can get involved in the ‘Stand Up For African Mothers’ campaign visit
www.amrefuk.org

For further information, please contact Rebecca Stagg on 0207 269 6867 or r.stagg@amrefuk.org

AMREF is Africa's leading health development organisation, saving and transforming people’s
lives in the continent's poorest and most marginalised communities. AMREF has been working for
55 years to bring good quality health care closer to those who need it most – improving access to
health treatment and preventing poor health through community education.www.amrefuk.org

In Africa 200,000 mothers a year are dying in pregnancy for want of the simple, affordable and
reachable medical care that women in other parts of the world take for granted.
The worst problems are in the most remote and poorest places, where there is little medical care.
1.5 million African children a year are left without a mother because she dies trying to give birth to
a brother or sister or in abortion related complications.
In some African countries the maternal death rate is getting worse, and it is unlikely that
Millennium Development Goal 5 (reducing maternal deaths by 75% by 2015) will be achieved
without urgent action.
It costs £1,600 to train a midwife, and in the course of her life, a midwife will save over a thousand
women’s lives. AMREF has trained half a million community health workers, particularly midwives,
who literally provide a life-line to remote and poor communities. But we need to train more.